Tin Boy

My mother called herself a modern-day witch. With all of her poultices and potions, I thought of her more as a mad scientist. But I should have thought of her as a magician, because one day she disappeared.

That day started like many others. It was one of those California valley summers that extends into the fall, the kind that leaves you thirsting for your mother’s limeade all day and dreaming of ice castles all night. On our walk home from sixth grade, the sun, having scorched the ridge where my nose had once broken, burned the back of my stringy neck and parched my friend Jenny’s delicate throat. At the end of my cul-de-sac we paused and tapped at our injured skin, making mock sad faces at each other.

My sweaty San Francisco 49ers t-shirt fell to the middle of my thighs, over my loose gray shorts. At age eleven I was double-jointed, and as Jenny and I climbed the porch steps, I bent my arms forward and backward, aiming to impress my mother, who used to adore my awkwardness and loved watching me journey home from her bedroom window. “My sweet, tottering son,” she would say as a greeting at the front door. She adored it until a few months ago, when my father was legally allowed to stop sending alimony payments, and she quit her job at a marketing firm so that she could devote her days to herbalism and witchcraft.

That day Jenny, her brown and auburn-streaked hair swinging, rushed ahead of me. At the welcome mat she turned and commanded a cloud to transform from a caterpillar into a butterfly. “Wouldn’t that be better, Arjit?,” she asked me, and I stroked my cheek with my knuckles as I nodded and pictured my mother—who would have once laughed at Jenny bossing the cloud around—raising her eyebrows. “Empress Jenny,” my mother said behind my friend’s back, her words etched with scorn. I hoped that day that my mother would be in a good mood.

Giggling, we tripped into the house. On the walk home, I had imagined begging my mother for limeade and devouring Wheat Thins covered with rice puffs and mustard oil, a concoction I had invented with her during a recent happy Sunday, but the drink and snack were not on the kitchen table or anywhere else. “Mom! Where’s my food?” I shouted.

Only the hum of the air conditioner answered. I scrunched my face. “Where is she?” I asked, trotting from room to room and finding no one.

“I’m sure she’s at the store,” Jenny said, getting a glass of water.

“How do you know? She always leaves a note—” that was our rule, a carryover from therapy when my mother couldn’t cope with the initial stages of divorce— “and I don’t see one anywhere.”

“I just know,” Jenny said, her breath smelling like Kit Kats in defiance of her mother, who had forbidden weekday candy.

In reality, Jenny knew only what I was willing to reveal. The overwhelming scent of honeysuckle on my mother’s skin as she said it was time for bed I mentioned to Jenny as if it were a weekly occurrence instead of daily. The nauseating scent of parsley on my mother’s nightgown, not washed for weeks now, I couldn’t bear to mention.

Another thing I didn’t tell Jenny: yesterday, after school, as I fumbled with my keys at the front door, a strange man left the house. Lanky yet sure-footed, outfitted in a gray suit and black dress shirt, stubble dotting his curved chin, he popped a clover leaf into his mouth and nodded at me, as if we were familiar to each other. I ran into the living room. “Mom! Who was that man?” I asked. She kissed my forehead. “An omen,” she replied, and wouldn’t say more. Last night I had seen his disembodied head and silver eyes that bulged just past his lids in a dream.

Wringing my hands in the kitchen, I paced in a circle around Jenny. “What if she’s run away for good?”

“Why would she do that?” Jenny asked, copying my circular steps until I stopped.

“It’s just that she’s always here on Tuesdays,” I said. “She told me it’s not good for her to break her routine.” I searched again for a note. My mother used to sprinkle sticky notes on the vase, the toaster, or the microwave, telling me how much she loved me. Now her notes were perfunctory. But they were always there.

Jenny rubbed her sneaker against the crumbs on the floor. “She probably just forgot. No big deal. And anyway,” she said, staring out the glass door and into the backyard, “this is an opportunity.” An “opportunity,” a word her mother used. I looked where she did, trying to see what she was seeing. The backyard, with its weedy lawn, barren of trees. A sky, now cloudless. Jenny tilted her head at me. “Trust me, Arjit,” she said. “I have a plan. It’ll help, I promise.”

“I hope she doesn’t forget about me,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen,” Jenny said. “You worry too much.” She laid her chin on my shoulder, until I shrugged it off. The impression of her chin stayed with me: pointed yet light, quivering yet warm. At recess or after school, Jenny grabbed my hands or wrists, urging me this way and that, especially when I panicked about my mother’s state of mind. But this gesture felt odd, like a bird fidgeting in her new nest.

Jenny touched my wrist. “What if your mother’s sleeping?” she asked.

The house was too quiet for my mother to be there—she snored louder than Father’s old lawn mower. Yet what if my mother had passed out from some new potion? I didn’t want Jenny to see her like that. “Oh my God,” I said, flopping onto the couch.

Jenny pulled me upright and led me upstairs, to my mother’s bedroom. As she grasped the doorknob, I sucked in my breath. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said. A few weeks ago, my mother had told us that the one room in the house that was off limits was her bedroom. “It’s private now,” my mother said. “A sanctuary.”

Now, standing there with Jenny, I wasn’t sure what we would find. Herbs scattered across the carpet? Elixir stains on her bedspread?

“But what if there’s a note in there?” Jenny asked. “This is practically an emergency—you’re so worried about her—she won’t mind,” she said. “In a way, it’s exciting, isn’t it? Your mom being away? She’s always around.” Jenny squeezed my hand. A softness accompanied her warmth. She opened my mother’s bedroom door and tugged me inside. What else could I do but follow?

My mother wasn’t there. Nor were any herbs, test tubes, or books on magick. Vacuum tracks marked the carpet. Gray venetian blinds covered all but a few inches of the windows; it was as if the room dozed with a worried awareness. I set my fingers on the bed, wishing they would burn in the muted light from the blinds. I wondered whether to call my father. I glanced at my calculator watch, a recent gift “for no reason” from him, the sales engineer who was always traveling away from me, and whom I had visited at his home in Arizona only once this past year. My mother had been gone just an hour. However I felt, I couldn’t annoy my father with my panicking.

Jenny approached the vanity and lifted my mother’s hairbrush. A few strands of silver hair hung from it, swaying like spider webs. “Tell me I’m not too old,” my mother pleaded once at the vanity, squeezing my chin. I shook my head even as her grip tightened. “Baby, baby, baby,” my mother chanted, exhaling her breath tinctured with vodka and cardamom pods, and pressing my cheek against her chest. I shut my eyes against the pressure of her hand and focused on her heartbeat, its steady rhythm soothing me.

“I have an idea!” Jenny said. She slithered beneath my parents’ bed, flexing her sneakered feet. She rummaged around. Objects shifted along the carpet.

“Find anything?” I asked, my voice a note higher than usual. I imagined abandoned test tubes crusted with unidentifiable herbs—love potions for my father—or old poultices crumbling to ash. I wiped my clammy palms on my shorts. What would my mother say if she found us goofing around in her bedroom?

“Nothing but a bunch of shoe boxes,” Jenny said, sliding one toward me. She wriggled out and lifted the box. “Maybe it has a note.”

“No, don’t!” I said, reaching toward Jenny, but she flicked the lid aside. Inside the box, a bundle of sketch paper lay face down. I untied the stack and flipped a piece over. A charcoal sketch of a man lying on our couch in his business suit, his hand aloft in mid-thought, his mouth in an unsure frown. It was the man—the stranger—from yesterday.

Before she quit, my mother worked part-time as an art director. Whenever she talked about being an art director, I begged her to draw me something, anything, a bird, a garbage truck, a new galaxy. But she told me that she didn’t draw at the office, that she told other people what to design and do. Yet my mother had sketched this man. My mother, Kamila, with her almost calligraphic “K’s”—there was the slant of the “K” in the position of the man’s arm, the soft tail of my mother’s “a” on the man’s chin.

“Who’s that?” Jenny asked.

“He must be imaginary,” I said, staring at the sketch, trying to divine its meaning. “I don’t know him.”

“He looks kind of bored, like he wants a cigarette,” Jenny said. “My father smokes all the time, and he gets that look.”

My mother called him an omen. The man’s hooded eyes—had they been that way at the door?—disturbed me. Jenny was wrong: his eyes didn’t say he was bored. Instead they said, You’re insignificant, you don’t do enough to matter to your mother.

“Arjit? Arjit, hello?” Jenny said, waving her hand in my face. “Put the sketch away. Let’s do something else.”

“But who is he?”

“I said put it away!” Jenny wrenched the sketch from me and slammed it on top of the others. The sketched man’s body waved in the air, but his glare remained, even as Jenny banged the lid shut and hurled the box beneath the bed. I flinched. Jenny’s chin, rigid and dimpled. This wasn’t like her. One summer the deep end of a swimming pool frightened me. Jenny held out her arms, waving her hands at me again and again, treading water without tiring, until I jumped in. My own fears must have knotted my expression, because Jenny relaxed her shoulders and face. “All right?” she asked, grinning when I bobbed my head up and down. “Time for another plan.”

Yawning, Jenny stretched, trying to touch the high ceiling. “Do you want to try out my new play? It’s got only one act so far. It’s rough—I’m still working it out.” She circled the bedroom, kicking her feet to the height of her waist as she walked.

“I don’t know,” I said, glancing around the room, half-expecting my mother to ghost through the walls. “Not here. We could act it out in the living room or backyard—”

“No, it’s perfect here.” Jenny, her arms stretched wide, spun in the center of the room. “Let’s act it out. She’ll be home before you know it.”

“I’ll get in trouble.”

“We won’t. No one will know.” Jenny flipped her hair back. For a moment, she assessed me, looking, I was sure, for any last traces of worry or doubt. “Do it for me, Arjit. I’m your guest. It’ll be fun. I promise.”

Jenny had been writing plays since third grade. She had never asked me to be in one.

I slid my feet inward and outward. “Okay,” I said. “But don’t expect me to be perfect or anything.”

At the foot of my mother’s bed, Jenny jumped up and down. “I’m warming up,” she said. “The area past the bed is the stage. The bed is where the seats are—we can watch each others’ solo scenes from there.”

“Solo scenes? Do I have to memorize lines? Is there a script?”

“No script. The play’s in my head.”

“Okay. Okay.” I clenched my hands along my shorts, willing my sweat to dissipate. I told myself that I could do this, that for a little while I could escape into someone else, even though I couldn’t loosen my worried self, rigid like a tin man—a tin boy—an android. While I shunned acting, temporary, harmless escape had always fascinated me. At age three I hid in kitchen cabinets or shoe closets, waiting for my parents to find me. At age seven I ran away from home and hid behind a couple of rose bushes in Jenny’s backyard. All I had wanted was for my laughing parents to find me, even though by then they were already warring. And find me my father did, coming by after dinner, asking Jenny’s father whether he could search the front and back yards for a missing imp. “Imp!” he cried when he found me cowering behind the rose bushes, not in fear of my father, but in fear of the thorns piercing my skin. My father lifted me into his careful arms and took me out to dinner. He told his own story of running away when he was my age, but on a rickshaw to the other side of his hometown, and not, as I had smartly done, to a friend’s. What stopped me from running away again was my mother, who chopped onions and said nothing of the incident then or later, and who ignored my bloody hands even as my father bandaged them in front of her.

“You’re tensing up—don’t be nervous,” Jenny said, positioning me in the middle of the room. “This is just for practice. For fun. And then we never have to do this again if you don’t want to.”

“Okay,” I said, cracking a small smile. Even my mouth was stiff.

Jenny held my hands. I wanted to melt into the familiarity of her palms, melt into the floor and escape my motherless house. But I couldn’t do that, not yet, because Jenny, my guest, needed me.

“All right. You’re a spy. A modern one. That means you don’t talk like a ’50s movie, you just talk like normal. But most people don’t know you’re a spy. It’s a secret.” Jenny lifted her eyebrows, asking if I understood.

“I think I get it,” I said, flexing my hands, which had been curled into fists. “But you must know about it.”

“Not me, my character, Jane—another spy. She’s secretive, too, but trusts her friend, the only other spy she knows.”

“Ah.” I scratched my nose and ear, and became hyperaware of the sensation of scratching. My whole body, firm and alert, wanted to slough off its skin. “And why are they meeting?”

“For a very secret spy mission,” Jenny said, leaning in and whispering. “She has to kill the president. He’s an alien.”

“How would she do that?!”

“That’s where you come in.” Jenny tapped my shoulder right as a lightheadedness overtook me. Where was my mother? I forced myself to remain upright. “Michael—that’s your spy name—is going to help Jane. Okay?”

“I’ve never thought about being a spy before,” I said. The house creaked, and my body tightened. “I can’t help you, I can’t.”

“You’re not helping me. Michael’s helping me. He’s helping me because he likes me. Michael and Jane are very close.”

She spoke on, waving her hands up and down. In my mother’s vanity mirror, Jenny stood straight, inches away from me, with her shoulders back and her feet hip-width apart. I slouched—my body formed a weak crescent—and for some reason I rocked back on my heels. I dropped my feet to the carpet. It was all I could do. “Does that make sense?” Jenny asked, touching my palm and letting her hand linger.

I hadn’t heard what she had said, but I nodded anyway. I reminded myself that I was brave every day at school just by showing up and raising my hand while my mother wasn’t there, so why couldn’t I be brave now? But why hadn’t my mother left a note? And who was that man?

“I’m waiting,” Jenny said, crossing her arms.

“Sorry,” I said. My socked feet seemed monstrous, not right for the daintiness of my mother’s bedroom. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You’re coming to meet me about the mission! Ask me what the first step is.”

“All right.” I rubbed my eyes. The room blurred. I wanted my mother. “What’s the first step?”

“We’re meeting by the Lincoln Memorial. Noon tomorrow. That’s where we’ll go over our plan.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but wasn’t sure what to say.

“Don’t worry about your lines. Just think about what Michael would say and say it. If you can’t think of anything, just do what he would do.”

“But I’ve never been a spy.”

“Arjit,” Jenny said, her voice rising. “Just do it. You can’t go wrong.”

“How?” I asked, clicking my teeth. “I can’t see it.”

“It’s just a play, Arjit! People can use their imaginations! I’m still coming up with the plot. I only wanted you to try, to do this for me. Jeez.” Jenny kicked off her shoes and climbed onto the bed. She glowered at me and gripped her jean skirt until her fingers whitened. And then she sank onto the bed and lay face down, for one minute, two, three.

“Jenny?” I said. Splayed on the bed like a broken doll, she slackened. I pressed my arms against my stomach.

“Jenny, tell me what’s wrong. Are you hungry? Let’s make a snack. You’ll never guess what Mom and I made up the other week.”

“Leave me alone, Arjit,” Jenny mumbled into the bedspread.

“I can’t,” I said, tapping a foot from side to side. “Not here. At least come downstairs with me. You can lie down on the couch. You don’t need to be near me if you don’t want to. But we can’t stay here.”

“Your mother’s not home,” she said, letting the bedspread flatten her voice into something inhuman.

“Please come downstairs with me, Jenny, please. We can act out your play in the living room, dining room, anywhere you want. This room creeps me out. It’s too quiet. Please come with me. Please.”

Jenny rolled over and gazed at the ceiling.

“I’m not leaving,” she said. She slouched against a pillow, and I could swear that she was even paler and lighter, that soon she would float away. In class we had just learned the word “fraught,” and Jenny, shutting her eyes and slumping, fit the definition.

“You have to,” I said, waving my hands, hoping the motion would compel Jenny to rise. “We have to get out of here.”

“There’s no point,” Jenny said, her voice listless. I recoiled. What about the swimming pool and all of the other times that Jenny had comforted me?

“You’re not doing your job!” I shouted.

Jenny winced and covered her eyes with her arm. “And what’s that supposed to be?” she asked, her voice no longer a single note, but broken and raw.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said. “You’re supposed to help me.”

But instead of helping me, Jenny curled into herself, like a snail hiding in its shell.

“Jenny!” I climbed onto the bed. Her body shook. Was she crying? “Don’t be upset, please.”

A sob broke free. I leaned back against the headboard, rigid as ever. What would the once unflappable version of my mother advise? I didn’t know. Resentment simmered within me. That version of my mother was an apparition, but I would have welcomed her dazed and witchy self to help me calm my friend.

While Jenny cried, I pressed my hands against my cheeks. I thought and thought. Just as I was giving up, a seed of an idea came to me. I sidled myself close to Jenny. I inhaled and counted to three. And I took her hand and kissed it.

Jenny jolted upright, and with her wide, watery eyes stared into mine. She leaned in, closer and closer, her mouth quivering, until our lips touched and locked. A surge of energy shot through me, though the kiss wasn’t electric the way I thought my first kiss would be. Instead it was like a large, balmy wave carrying me back to shore when I didn’t even know I had been at sea.

We parted. I told myself not to hyperventilate, but just thinking of the word made me do so, until Jenny touched my lips with her salty fingers.

I gazed at Jenny, whose flushed face absorbed me. “Was that your plan all along?” I asked, thinking back on Michael, thinking back on every look and touch from her that afternoon that I had mistaken for simple concern.

Jenny smiled at her lap. Her flush deepened. Be brave, I told myself, and though my hand trembled, I touched her face.

“Are you still anxious?” Jenny asked.

“Not as much,” I said, and it was true. I tried evoking worry for my mother, imagining her reaction to finding Jenny and me in her bedroom, but it was as if my mother were far away, a distant dream.

Even though my hand shook, I stroked Jenny’s shoulder.

“I’m proud of you,” she said, wrapping her arm around me. “Come here.” Jenny leaned my head against her shoulder. We stayed like that until the evening, resting and talking. I breathed into Jenny’s blouse, taking comfort in the lavender scent of her sunscreen, until we heard the jingle of keys at the front door.

We sprang off the bed and hurried downstairs—I don’t remember whether we shut the door—just as my mother stepped into the house, silent and spaced out. My mother, half her hair falling into her eyes, the other half wild and tangled, her face lit with an ethereal happiness. Not her usual state. As I halted at the foot of the stairs, she gazed past me, like I was an empty glass distorting her vision.

“Mom,” I whispered, not wanting her anymore. Bits of herbs dotted her fingertips, and the scent of bay leaves wafted.

“Arjit!” she said. “I have the most wonderful news. Phil’s invited me to join his coven. We’re moving in together!”

“We are?” I asked.

“Oh no, not you. You’re moving in with your father.” She flipped through the day’s junk mail. “You met Phil yesterday. What did you think of him?”

I clutched my stomach. I felt like I was in a falling elevator. “Who cares about Phil!” I said. My lip twitched, and I bit it. “I can’t move to Arizona!”

“Nonsense. Of course you can—people move all the time.”

“But this is my home.” I glanced at Jenny’s face and remembered another vocabulary word: “impassive.”

“You’ll make a new one. It’s all been arranged,” my mother said, looking dreamily at Jenny and me.

My stomach became a cave of ice, and I stepped away from Jenny so that she would not have to feel it. A pleasing image came to me of clawing at my mother’s face, gashing at it with my fingers until they bloodied. “I’m not going,” I said. “And I’m not living with Phil.”

“You’ll go. You’ll change your mind,” my mother said, shifting her eyes between Jenny and me. “Jenny, how are you?” she asked, but before Jenny could respond, my mother turned to throw away the junk mail.

Much of the rest of the evening remains vivid. Jenny hugged me, spinning me away from my mother, and I felt the hummingbird flutter of her heartbeat. She breezed past my mother and left the house as if she thought my mother was uninteresting. For dinner, my mother microwaved tater tots and fish sticks. Before I even finished my meal, she cradled the cordless phone against her cheek as she headed into the guest room and locked it. She spoke to Phil, though when I put my ear to the door, I couldn’t make out her words. Just a few months ago she would have asked me about my day or encouraged me to practice the clarinet. But my mother kept murmuring, not even caring that she sat in the dark.

I changed into my pajamas and tried to sleep. The sketch of Phil with his hooded eyes enraged me. I snuck into my mother’s empty bedroom and swiped the sketch. I folded it into a microscopic square and stuck it in my sneaker, then I stomped around the house, crushing Phil’s face and laughing as I imagined his new contortions. The house was hot, so I walked onto the front porch. And then I kept walking.

At Jenny’s house, I scaled the fence into her backyard. The rose bushes were taller and heavier than when I was seven, but the dirt behind them proved a cool sitting spot. I waited. Clouds crept over the moon, and my fingers, hands, and arms vanished. So this was what it was like to be among the disappeared. The night grew cooler, and I shivered. In the darkness, my waist and legs vanished, too. I waited some more. The wind rustled leaves, or was that someone approaching? I stood and stretched my arms outward, but only encountered air. My heart thrummed the sound of sadness. Stumbling, I stepped forward until I stood near Jenny’s window. I tossed pebbles at it. A light switched on, illuminating my hands and arms, and pinpricking my body with hope.